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Drug Dealers in Orvieto, Italy?

We were in Orvieto two weeks ago and observed some odd behavior in this Umbrian hill town. We had about an hour to wait at the train station for our train back to Rome and since it was a lovely day, we sat outside.

A few minutes after we sat down, a man sat next to us with a huge jar of what appeared to be moisturizer with a bright pink lid. That's it, no man purse, or anything else but his phone. (We were only there for the day but did have our purses and other bags.) He tried engaging us in conversation, which we ignored, but soon moved away because it was annoying.

Then two men from NY arrived and they looked like gang members. Yes, I realize I'm making some major assumptions here but my sister, who has worked in an inner-city hospital in NJ for 30+ plus years, recognized the "type." One guy said he'd like to "f" me and although there were a few people around, including some Americans who we were talking to earlier, there wasn't a cop or any type of official in site, so we became concerned and moved inside.

We were able to see them through the window where they were joined by others and they seemed to lose interest in us. One of the Americans came into the station and said that one of the guys was bragging about the fact that he's killed people and would happily kill again.

Our best guess was that this was a drug deal or some other crime taking place and that the pink jar was used to identify the guy to the NYers. Any thoughts as to what all of this was and please don't say nothing because it was quite obvious that these guys weren't there to enjoy the Duomo?

TDudette, yes, in hindsight you are correct but in reality, I doubt ticket agent (only person at the station) would have done a thing. Honestly, at that point we just wanted to become invisible and not draw any more attention from these guys while we were at the station. If they had gotten on the train we certainly would have.

nochblad, actually if you think about it, Orvieto is the perfect place for drug dealers or other criminal activity. Close to Rome, tons of tourists, and again not one cop in site in the hour we were there.

Trust me, if I'm going to have a fantasy, it's not going to be about disgusting gang members but instead it would be about any of the other drop dead gorgeous Italian men we encountered on our trip.

I don't know why you think proximity to Rome and tourists is great for the drug dealing business in Italy.

Most drug dealers I've known -- and yes, I've known some! -- don't call a lot of attention to themselves, and they try not to annoy potential customers, or do things that would attract complaints to train station personnel, authorities.

I'm not going to dispute you had a bizarre experience, but reading other posts about your recent trip to Italy with your sister -- now represented on Fodor's as both an authority on invisible mold and international gang behavior. You do seem to dramatize and have reactions others don't, and come to conclusions others don't. (Why wouldn't the only ticket seller in the station not want to know about potentially dangerous people in the station? They've got cell phones.)

Don't know who the guys were, but maybe they enjoyed freaking out tourists. As for the guy with a jar and pink lid, he sounds harmless even if odd.

For something as serious as described this should have been reported. Why not? WHY NOT?

Since you didn't this sheds considerable doubt on what occured or on what you thought occured.

In over 30 years in Italy I have never come across anything similar and certainly not in a place such as Orvieto.

After failing to report it to the authorities why has it taken you 2 weeks to post it to Fodors?

Also the station is not in Orvieto but in the plain below so the individuals may not have had no interest in Orvieto and its Duomo. The location may have been quite fortuitous if the event occured as described.

If I was a public official of Orvieto or even a simple citizen I would be most offended by a posting which is quite denigratory.

I posted this because I thought someone might have some useful insight as to what we witnessed, obviously a pretty foolish thought on my part.

nochblad, I'm well aware of the location of the train station and proximity to the Duomo. As to why I didn't post before, Internet service was sporadic throughout our trip, which I'm sure you understand after 30 years in Italy. I returned home this week and am just now catching up on things. For what it's worth, I'm most offended by your comments as to my motives and reactions.

sandralist, at the risk of striking some as paranoid, I believe you've disliked me and made disparaging comments about me since the time when you were posting as zeppole. You argued with me because you didn't like my review of Albergo del Senato. Normally I wouldn't care or even but you were quite offensive about it.

I completely understand your concern and agree that you did the right thing by just removing yourself as far away as possible from what was an uncomfortable situation.
Your experience reminded me of a interesting encounter about 15 years ago in Scopello, a small village in Sicily.

My husband and I were on a lovely trip to Sicily and in addition to visiting the better known cities such as Palermo, Siricusa, Taromina, Messina, Monreale we also wanted to experience some small towns.
We spent time in Erice and Scopello.
Scopello was a highlight of our trip, a very lovely very small village with a water well in the center of the town square for people to come and get water to bring back to their homes.
One day while sitting by the well a man came to us and started to speak to us in English. We discovered he came from New York and when he told us the exit he took on the Long Island Express to reach his home we told him we had a home a few exits further East..

He was so eager to talk to Americans and particularly someone who lived near where his home used to be.We talked with him for about 10 minutes. We understood that he would not be going back to the States
He seemed to miss the USA and we fantasized that he may have been deported by the USA government because of his ties to 'THE MAFIA"
Obviously we did not ask him why he did not return to the USA.
Sometimes it is better not to be too inquisitive .

Our experience was not a frightening one like the one you experienced but it did add some excitement to our stay in Scopello.

First thought on reading title of this thread was " duh.. there are drugs everywhere.. and so therefore drug dealers" .

Then I read the thread and laughed. I think they had fun at all you tourists .. playing Mafia for you guys.. lol good fun.

Just out of interest.. you said the first fellow tried to engage you in conversation but it was annoying..do all locals annoy you , or was it because of something he said in particular.. or was it because he was a man and you are afraid of foreign men talking to you in public places?

I don't believe for a minute that the pink jar had anything to do with anything.. drug dealers do not draw attention to themselves for goodness sake( and yes.. I too have known some)

My second thought was.. outwest and sandralist are probably well on target.. they just wanted to freak you out.. you likely look like total tourists and they just wanted to be rude and have some fun with you.

justineparis, the first guy was not a local. He had what seemed to be an African accent, and yes, I'm aware that there there are several different accents from the various countries. He was like the street vendors who approach you with selfie sticks, umbrellas, etc. and thus we had absolutely no interest in talking to him. My guess about the pink jar was that he was using it to identify himself to those he was meeting.

joannnyc, the NYers announced to us upon their arrival that they were from Brooklyn.

LouisaH, I thought I did add something valuable, which is, another voice telling you that you are overthinking this incident. You seem to find posts saying "there, there, what a horrible thing to have lived through" valuable, so I am not surprised you did not appreciate mine, but that's how it goes on a public forum, isn't it? I maintain that you would be a happier traveler and poster if you were to stop ascribing evil meanings to the merely bizarre.

I think if she wanted to pull our legs, she would come up with something less bizarre.

I think she was trying to be politically correct here, and it made her story less plausible. It is only well along in the dialogue that we learn that Mr. Pink Jar had an African accent. That suggests that he was a person of color. Were the Americans persons of color as well?

When she wrote that they were dressed in gang clothing, I assumed she meant Joe Pesci collars. But if the gang clothes were hip hop style, it makes more sense. The end result is that they were all trying to pull her chain. There is a less polite phrase.

When my wife and I were in Paris in June, two kids on scooters kept riding up on the sidewalk to buzz us, trying to scare us. They were part of a largish multiethnic group of kids being general badasses to pass a boring Saturday afternoon.

My wife and I have signals for this kind of situation. I walked straight toward the obvious leader who was between us and the passage we needed to walk down. I looked him in the eye and said, "Eh, bonjour, Monsieur! Ça va bien?" Having been an exceptionally obnoxious teenager myself, albeit very long ago, I thought this might break the tension. It did. We walked past and down the passage.

The point of this story is not to congratulate myself but to suggest that sometimes you walk into trouble and sometimes trouble finds you. Her story strange but not at all unbelievable. Young people, young men, possibly high on weed or booze, ranking on tourists? Sure!

Ackislander, thank you for understanding the situation and putting together the pieces. Initially, I deliberately didn't mention that pink jar guy was African because I thought someone would call me out for being racist.

The NYers were in hip-hop style clothing and had Hispanic accents. If they had been Joe Pesci types, it wouldn't have seemed so odd. I don't know what they were up to but their behavior was menacing and threatening.

Again, thank you for being the voice of reason on a thread that went off the rails after the first response.

Sometimes weird things happen while we're on holiday, which it is difficult to make sense of. IME [as an observer] drug dealers don't parade their deals like this - they are mostly grubby affairs conducted under bridges and shop doorways.

Lousia - you most probably will never know what was going on, but your instinct to move away and leave them to it was a good one.

LouisaH, I have no doubt it could have happened as you say. Just consider it one of the unique and wonderful things things that make travel interesting, in the US as well as Europe. Since it looked interesting, I would probably have asked the guy what he had in the jar, but you likely did the best thing.

We had some kinda shady characters on the train platform with us in Orvieto a few years ago. They didn't do anything other than look at us, talk and gesture. They obviously weren't feeling any love towards us American tourists. Sometimes you get a bad vibe and get spooked and better safe than sorry.

Two cents from an Italian: Orvieto is not the place for much drug traffic or shady deals. It is the kind of place where something happening on the north side of the town gets known to south side, by word of mouth, within half an hour. Actually, it is the kind of place where kids would have difficulties in misbehaving, as their mothers would be reported by neighbors even before they come home. It is the kind of place where a cheating husband has to move at least 50 kms to find a lover, or his wife would know everything in twenty minutes. If you have not lived there you cannot understand the social pressure of living in a small hill town where everybody knows everybody - probably you can sustain only if you are born there and you develop in years both your own shell and ways to reciprocate.

The only way to explain the story here above is that all the persons involved are foreign people that probably do not understand this fact. But if any of the situations were too dangerous, be sure that carabinieri would have been notified by somebody much earlier than you think.

First of all, I'm sure that the incident in Orvieto wasn't a matter of drugs, and probably not gangs, either, if most of the people were not Italian. There are youth gangs in Italy, but they don't really welcome foreigners into their ranks. However, asps must be living in the clouds. His idea of the bucolic life in Italian hill towns is naive,and if he has anything to do with young people, it's dangerously naive.

I live in a hill town in Italy that's even smaller than Orvieto, and I can assure you that there is an alarming use of drugs in this town, and the parents of the kids who are doing drugs usually don't know anything about it until the kid is addicted. And nearby hill towns have even more serious problems. In all of these towns, there are meetings organized every year by the town government to enlighten parents about the drug problem, but unfortunately the parents who need the information the most are sure that they don't need it.

I used to live in center city Philadelphia and in New York, in the 1960s, and have known numerous drug dealers and even more drug addicts. I recognize the signs of heroin addiction.

Nowadays, most parents would greatly resent any neighbor calling them up to tell them that their kid is nodding out at the ice cream kiosk, so most people would not be so bold as to call the parents. Ask any teacher what's likely to happen if she tells the parents of a student that he's been misbehaving at school.

I've known personally two really great kids in my town, both in their early 20s, who were addicted to heroin. I don't know whether their parents knew or not. In both cases, I did all I could to encourage these kids to pursue their dreams and to continue their studies, but I never told them I had figured out that they were addicts. I wanted them to continue to know that I had boundless confidence in them. One has overcome his addiction, and the other moved away, so I don't know.

Here's a story told to me by a teacher who lives near me. She called in the parents of a child in her class to tell them she was concerned about their son, who had been bullying another child and using foul language in the classroom. The mother replied with the Italian equivalent of, "F$%&£g right, if the kid's an a$$h%le, my son should tell him so!"

My comment that LouiseH was pulling our collective legs was sarcastic. I know she believes what she wrote.

It is extraordinary to me that people would overhear talk of people bragging of killing people, and feel threatened and harassed in a train station, and not say anything to a train conductor or official, and that other people on Fodor's would respond "Good on you! You did the right thing!"

As for the African with the pink-lidded jug who did nothing but try to converse with LouiseH, so her conclusion was that he was a drug dealer -- sounds like a racist mindset to me! (and... Hispanic accents?)

In her opening report she stated - Yes, I realize I'm making some major assumptions here but my sister, who has worked in an inner-city hospital in NJ for 30+ plus years, recognized the "type."

I presume that her sister knows that certain activities require mandatory reporting. Why did she turn away here?

Frankly the title of the posting is the big giveaway. It was bound to generate comment of which, I suppose, I am guilty.

But my initial reaction is often one of query as to the facts rather than girly knee-jerk support - I have been Donald Trump OTT here - which is often too automatically supportive rather than valutative.

LouiseH's post demosntrates such incoherent thinking it is barely worth discussing as a real event, but you might notice in the first post that she and her sister began looking for cops inside the station because they were unnerved by the behavior of the guys who said they wanted to "f" her. I would be alarmed too. Failing to see cops -- like LouiseH -- I would have moved away, but I also would have moved in the direction of the ticket office to alert the ticket seller in the station -- especially if said person was solitary female.

Hair dressing? It could have been anything.

It is one thing to recognize that addiction knows no borders, and that that anyone who thinks there are not grandmothers in Italy quietly drinking themselves to death, or teens taking heroin in small towns, or doctors downing pain killers, or others losing their lives to Twitter addiction, etc -- that is an illusion if you think such things don't happen in small town Italy, even though it is in the nature of addiction to hide itself, and for others to look away or make pointless moral judgemnts.

However, it is seems like there a quite a different kind of illusory thinking going on in LouiseH's post, including concluding she was in the midst of an American inner-city gang threat but being unable to see a reason why a train station official or other passengers might have an interest in knowing about that or would be in a position to do something about it if informed.

Whatever the reality of what happened, it is LouiseH who sent this one off the rails.

Woman from the United States of America is waiting for a train in a town in Italy. Is approached by a male of African appearance, bearing a jar of indeterminate size, with a pink lid. Two other males make disparaging comments, including obscenities. This pair of males sound as though they might have been involved in gang culture in New York City, USA. Said gentlemen make conversation with one another which American woman understands to mean that said gentlemen have committed a homicide.
American woman moves away, and the story ends.

Various persons state that American woman should have "reported" the incident.
In most legal jurisdictions, "reporting" means laying a complaint with the police.

One wonders what American woman's complaint might have contained. Like

"Hey, I heard these men talking. One said to the other that he'd rubbed another guy out."

I doubt if many people would take the time to try to "report" shady dealings in train stations to some official, whomever that might be, especially in a foreign country. Ever try to even get info in a train station? No crime was committed, after all, to report.

Clearly there are some people here who whilst on holiday are blessed never to see something they don't understand, who never feel worried, let alone threatened by the peculiar doings of others, and who always know how to react in the most appropriate way.

To them I say "well done". It must be great to live in a world of such confidence and certainty.

As for the rest of us, we'll just keep muddling along, trying to keep safe in the face of the weird and worrying things that happen to us occasionally. And just in case we face the scorn and ire of those who know so much better than us what was happening, even though we were there and you weren't, we'll keep quiet about it too.

zeppole (AKA sandralist), and nochblad, I'm confused. First you accuse me of fantasizing, embellishing, pulling your legs, making the whole story up etc. and now you're strongly admonishing me for not reporting this to the authorities. Also, nice dig zeppole about me that because the man was African, I assumed he was a drug dealer.

OK, I reread your OP and I still don't see why you assumed the guy with the jar was a drug dealer. If not because he was African, then why? Because he was meeting the crude guys from New York? (Was he meeting them? I'm not clear about that, either.)

LouisaH, you really are remarkably humorless about this bizarre event! No harm came to you, nor would have come to you in a crowded station, so I can't understand posting about it if you're not, a) going to entertain alternate explanations to your absurd drug deal theory, or, b) make fun of the whole thing.